Enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) systems are designed to coordinate some or all of the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes. An ERP system may support business functions including some or all of manufacturing, supply chain management, financials, projects, human resources, customer relationship management, and the like. In addition, an ERP system may facilitate and/or record data relating to live transactions, so in many cases, a business may require that its ERP system continuously perform well enough that live transactions can be processed in a timely fashion.
Many ERP systems incorporate a centralized database or other ERP data store, and many ERP vendors provide one or more reporting tools that can be used to access the ERP data store. However, it can be difficult and expensive to use vendor-provided reporting tools. Consequently, many businesses must maintain an expensive information technology (“IT”) to facilitate custom report creation. In many cases, creating a custom report may cost thousands of dollars to an enterprise running an ERP system.
In addition, generating reports directly from an ERP data store can compromise performance and security of the ERP data store. For example, generating a report may involve running a complex, inefficient, and/or badly-formed query against the ERP data store, which could at least temporarily hinder the ERP data store's ability to facilitate live transactions. In part to prevent report generation from hindering transaction performance, many businesses generate reports using data from a “data warehouse,” which may be updated from the ERP data store periodically (e.g., once a day, often overnight or during other times when the ERP data store is relatively not busy). However, data in such a data warehouse may not always reflect the most recent transactions. Moreover, maintaining a discrete data warehouse may be expensive.
Similar difficulties may arise with non-ERP database systems as well.